Blocked on [X]? Then Do [X]!

So today I reach the end of the experiment with is the book club review of ‘How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing” 21 posts in 21 days. On top of that, I decided I didn’t want to just be a total one-trick pony for three weeks, so I committed to writing an additional blog post each of those 21 days.

An interesting thing happened. Was each of those extra blog posts a winner? Nope, but then blogging is often hit and miss. You never really know which posts will grab people’s attention, but you can sometimes guess. At first I feared I’d run out of stuff to talk about, but somehow I was able to come up with something, and often enough somethings to actually get a few days ahead and schedule several posts. It’s a testament to Jerry Weinberg’s idea of Fieldstone gathering; stuff is all around us, we just have to have the eyes to look and then follow through with the energy to pick the stones up to use them.

I often find it more difficult to write when I’ve taken a few days away from the blog. Then, unless I am finding myself dealing with a timed topic (a class, a meet-up, a podcast or something that needs to be talked about that day), it can be a real struggle coming up with something to write about. Lesson from the last three weeks is that you don’t see stones when you aren’t looking for them. Likewise, you don’t see topics and ideas for those topics unless you are actually writing.

This also applies to my struggles with coding. I sound like such a broken record here, but again, I need to remind people that I am not writing about coding and tech writing because I’m really good at it, I write about it because in reality I’m rather mediocre or exceptionally bad at it. However, the writing about it gives me an avenue to explore it in a different way when my brain is telling me “OK, dude, really, I’ve kind of had it with the (Cucumber, Ruby, Rspec, JavaScript, CSS3, fill in the blank)”. It lets me actually see what I know and it gives me more reasons to keep applying what I am learning, even if that learning is terribly slow.

So yes, your painfully optimistic TESTHEAD friend is suggesting that, to fix what is ailing ya’, do more of what is ailing ya’ :). Thus, you can expect to see more posts about (Cucumber, Ruby, Rspec, JavaScript, CSS3, fill in the blank) in the near future. Bet on it :).